Maple Leaf Foods asks if people, technology aid food safety more

Canadian meat and poultry company hosts annual Food Safety Symposium

Maple
Leaf Foods hosted its sixth annual Food Safety Symposium recently in
Mississauga, Ontario. At the event, 170 representatives from more than 100
companies and organizations gathered at Maple Leaf's invitation to discuss the
most pressing concerns in food safety. The 2014 edition of event was themed
"People or Technology", asking participants to debate which was the
best investment to make a steep change in food safety globally.

"Food safety incorporates a broad cross-section of people
and technologies and so we adopted a deliberatively provocative theme this year,"
said Dr. Randy Huffman, senior vice president of operations and chief food safety
officer at Maple Leaf. "Everyone would choose "both" to the
question of investing in people versus technology, but in reality, resources
are never unlimited and choices about investments, both large and small, are
made each and every day. The provocative question we debated was which
investment would lead to the greatest advancement?"

Those advocating investments in people spoke about food safety
behaviors being the ultimate determinant of whether or not a food process will
produce a safe product. The tens of thousands of people working at each step of
the journey from farm to fork need to be on side to make a step change in
global food safety. Those who said technology would move us further, faster,
highlighted the timely, data driven decisions new investments foster.
Technology saves lives and brings people together in a virtual environment so
that sharing and learning can occur.

"The point of this annual event is to help advance the
cause of food safety," Huffman said. "This resolution had people
focused on the best way to achieve that, making it a successful day for all
involved."

The symposium participants had the opportunity to learn more of
the "Safe Food Canada - The Learning Partnership" a proposed model
for standardizing food safety competencies and enabling people working in the
Canadian food industry to progress and grow in the profession with the overall
goal of improvement of Canadian food safety performance. A session was also
dedicated to the role technology is playing in food manufacturing.

Maple Leaf Foods has
adopted a food safety promise to provide consumers safe, great tasting food
produced in a safe work environment. An enabling principle in fulfilling this
promise is the notion that Maple Leaf treats food safety as a non-competitive
issue and actively shares food safety learnings and promotes sharing of
information among industry and government groups through events such as this
annual symposium.